- The rise of online news sources has left many to regard the local newspaper as a thing of the past, but today's guest describes how he and his family have kept Iowa's Storm Lake Times newspaper alive in the digital age.

He's Art Cullen, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(dynamic music) Hello, and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller with The Providence Journal.

- This week, we're joined by Art Cullen, Pulitzer Prize winning editorial writer and editor at the Storm Lake Times, a newspaper in the small town of Storm Lake, Iowa.

Art, thank you so much for being with us.

- Well thanks for having me.

- So, we wanna talk to you a little bit about the world of local news, but let's start a little bit with telling our audience about Storm Lake, Iowa.

- Well, Storm Lake is a rural farming and meat packing community in Northwest Iowa.

It's three hours from anywhere.

(laughs) It's a heavily immigrant community because of meatpacking.

About 90% of our elementary school children are children of color, mainly from someplace else, primarily Mexico and Latin America.

- That's sort of belies, I think the, at least the, a lot of the coastal perception of rural Iowa.

Is this a recent demographic shift?

- Well, since about 1980, when the state of Iowa invited the entire Tai Dam culture from Laos to basically move to Iowa from Thai refugee camps.

And they did, and they established a beachhead in Storm Lake working at the IBP, now the Tyson pork processing facility, where we process about 15,000 hogs a day.

And about 300 Asian refugees started working in the meat packing plant.

About 1990, a big wave of Latinos came in from rural Mexico, Jalisco.

And we have people from Cuba, Myanmar, Sudan, 27 languages are spoken in Storm Lake.

- So how were these immigrants received by residents of Storm Lake?

I mean, this is clearly a great cultural change, and indeed an economic change.

And maybe you can get into the economic changes too, but how were they received?

This is quite a change.

- Well, they've been received in waves.

And at first, when Southeast Asian refugees came in, there was some resentment because at the same time, IBP busted the union at the meat packing plant.

And these Asians were replacement workers for a lot of union people.

And so unfortunately they were caught in that crossfire.

And then a lot of Anglos were asking, weren't these the guys we were fighting in Vietnam?

Well, no, in fact, they were the people who were fighting on our behalf, CIA operatives operating in Cambodia and Laos.

And so eventually people got used to it.

They're hard working, patriotic people who hosted Christmas dinner parties for Anglos with egg rolls and fried rice.

And we came to embrace the Asian refugees.

And then the Latinos came, and originally they were, at first they were young rural men from small farming communities, who got drunk at night and got in bar fights.

And so then there was this wave of kind of anti-Latino sentiment, until the federales came one day and raided our meat packing plants.

And penned up a bunch of Asians, African-Americans, and Latinos in the noon-day sun.

And the whole town was so revolted by it that we said, no more of this.

We all of a sudden came together around Latinos as well.

And so, that was 1996.

And since then the police department does not stop or arrest people for being undocumented.

And it's, however, we are in the fourth congressional district of Northwest Iowa, we call it a little slice of Texas.

And our Congressman for 20 years was the xenophobic Steve King.

So there's that contrast that exists in American culture and politics today.

- Art, is Storm Lake an outlier in rural Iowa agriculture meatpacking communities?

In that respect, in terms of its politics and its diversity?

Or is it pretty emblematic?

- No, Storm Lake is an outlier politically in rural Iowa.

Rural Iowa's deep red Farm Bureau country.

Farm Bureau would be the most important political institution in the state.

And they control the state universities, and the education system, along with the Koch brothers, brother.

And so it's a little dot of blue in a sea of red.

And it really is an anomaly.

But there are these meatpacking communities that are scattered throughout the Midwest.

Worthington, Minnesota, Marshalltown, Iowa, down in Northern Missouri there's a lot of Latino enclaves, Dodge City, Kansas, Garden City, Kansas.

There's these Latino enclaves that are growing.

And that's really our future because the, there's nothing to do for a college educated Anglo to do in Garden City, Kansas, or Worthington, Minnesota.

And so the Anglos get an education and leave, and they're replaced by immigrants who are putting their boot on the first rung on the ladder to American success.

It's the classic American success story.

It used to be Eastern Europeans, now it's Latinos and Sudanese.

- So let's get into your great newspaper.

You edit it, you co-own it with family members.

And you grew up in Storm Lake, what interested you in journalism in the first place as a young person, as a young man?

What was the appeal of journalism growing up in Storm Lake?

- Well, they sent me off to school at the College of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, an all men's school, where I intended to major in business.

And because I never went to class, I flunked accounting.

And it was terribly boring, it was 8:00 in the morning.

And so I realized I wasn't gonna be a business major.

So I got stoned one night in my dorm room and looked through the college catalog.

And I was interested in Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward from The Washington Post, and their harassment of Richard Nixon, and helping get rid of a crook and a liar.

And the only requirement in the journalism program was that you had to be able to type 25 words a minute, and I could.

And so I majored in journalism.

And I graduated from high school with a 2.6 grade average.

And I graduated from college with a 2.6 grade average.

- Consistency.

- I was consistent.

And that's why I majored in journalism, honestly.

And my brother, John, had a job at a newspaper in a little town called Algona, Iowa, Northern Iowa, not too far from Storm Lake.

And it's actually where our parents hail from.

And he landed me a job when I could barely put a sentence together, in Algona.

- So you started there, but you told NPR on "Fresh Air" that your goal was to join the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which of course was, and I guess still is a great newspaper.

So, but you didn't do that.

You decided to come back and start a newspaper of your own.

Tell us that story.

How did that come to be?

And why did you decide not to, you mentioned not wanting to go into corporate journalism.

Talk about the founding story, I guess, as it were.

- Well, Minnesotans fail to appreciate the brilliance of Iowans, even though Minnesota was born from Iowa's loin, after we stole it from the Indians.

And so I never did get that job at the Star Tribune.

I was a copy boy there in college, fetching coffee for editors.

And then John landed me this job at Algona, Iowa.

And then I went off and worked at daily newspapers in Ames and Mason City, Iowa.

And John started this newspaper in our hometown in 1990, and he needed an editor, he was overwhelmed with the work.

And so I came home to help him.

And we launched the paper in 1990.

First as a weekly, then we went daily for a year, and lost our shorts, and then returned to twice a week.

Now we're about 3,000 circulation in a county seat town of about 10,000 to 15,000.

We're not sure how many people live here because so many are immigrants.

And we were fortunate enough to win a Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for editorial writing on agricultural pollution of surface waters in Iowa.

- Can you give us a little bit more of an overview of that Pulitzer Prize, which of course is a tremendous honor, and congratulations, a few years late, but congratulations.

- Well thanks.

Fun fact to know and tell, we were the smallest newspaper to win a Pulitzer, I think.

Maybe the second smallest, Vacaville, California, might've been smaller than us.

But anyway, I wear that feather in my cap.

The country bumpkin editor who won a Pulitzer.

(both laughing) It was a series of 10 editorials we published in 2016, regarding a lawsuit by the Des Moines Waterworks against three Northwest Iowa counties, including ours.

And we went and asked the board of supervisors, how are you gonna pay for the defense of this lawsuit, since you have no insurance coverage for pollution litigation?

And they said, it's none of your business.

We have friends.

Well, we found out who the friends were through our own reporting, and challenged them to release their donor list under the Iowa public records law with the Iowa Freedom of Information Council.

And raised such a stink that it won us a Pulitzer.

And you know, it kind of changed my life, certainly.

I wouldn't be talking to you today, for example.

(all laughing) - Well, you might've been, you never know.

I don't wanna leave the details on the cutting room floor though, so who were their friends?

- Well, it was of course, Monsanto, now Bayer, but back then it was Monsanto, and Koch Fertilizer, out of Wichita, Kansas.

Monsanto was headquartered in St. Louis.

And the fertilizer industry and all, Farm Bureau, and all the customary players.

And the truth of it was that what we were able to reveal was that people in Wichita, Kansas, and St Louis, Missouri were calling the shots for our county board of supervisors who were defending themselves in this lawsuit.

So it wasn't the electors of Buena Vista County who controlled our county anymore.

It was the Koch brothers and Monsanto, they were calling the shots.

And the public deserved to know that.

- So the paper you co-own and edit is very much a family operation.

And let me just go through the list of family members.

Your brother, John, is the publisher, you're the editor, your wife, Dolores, photographs and writes, your son, Tom, is a reporter, and your sister-in-law, Mary, writes a food column.

Can you describe a typical day, or even a typical week at your paper?

How does it all come together?

- Also, Peach the newshound guards our office.

(both laughing) Four year old mutt, a four year old beautiful mutt, Peach.

So we don't wanna forget her.

And so, yeah, it's a family enterprise.

And we have five other people working there who aren't named Cullen.

And they're tremendous hard workers too.

But we started out as a couple brothers with a love for our hometown, you know, and a love for journalism, and an appreciation of facts.

And we try and do it in a laid-back atmosphere where a dog can chew on a tennis ball.

- Is it the kind of operation where a citizen or resident of the city can just drop by, and come into the newsroom, and give you a tip, or have coffee, or whatever?

I mean, that's kind of the image I have.

- Well yeah, sure, anybody can walk in anytime.

We won't offer 'em coffee because John doesn't like coffee, so we don't have that.

- [G.] They can pet the dog though, right?

- Yeah, they can pet the dog and we'll offer 'em some lukewarm water.

But yeah, people walk in and that's a difference between what I define as metro journalism and community journalism, is we're a lot closer to our readers and our community than say the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

No knock on the Star Tribune, they're doing a great job in a huge metroplex.

Garrison Keillor of the Prairie Home Companion, his fictional editor, Harold Star of the Herald Star, in Lake Wobegon, the motto on his newspaper was, we gotta live here too.

So that kind of sets up a different, different parameters for community journalism.

When somebody can walk into the office and grab you by the lapels.

- How do you think that changes the community?

We've had other folks on the air talking about news deserts, communities in America that are either unserved or underserved by more regional news outlets.

What does having a paper like Storm Lake Times mean for the town of Storm Lake?

- Well, first of all, there've been academic studies done.

The best I know of is from the University of Notre Dame, where, I gotta plug 'em, John went to Notre Dame, he's a Domer, shows that these news deserts, government spending goes up, corruption tends to increase, crime rates are higher.

Because where there's a newspaper, we're providing a check on local government spending and taxation.

We publish local property tax rates and what your levy's gonna be.

And we shame people in the paper for drunk driving, and domestic assault, and all those sorts of things.

It tends to make people behave.

And it's been empirically studied and shown.

And that's what happens when you lose local news.

And in Storm Lake, we led the charge to dredge our lake, which God made 26 feet deep.

And through agricultural practices we managed to fill in, and so it got down to seven feet deep.

We engineered a $20 million campaign to dredge that lake, and enlisted the help of the state.

And everybody from fishermen to bankers.

We engineered a $40 million resort along the lake after dredging, to invite people in to see that Storm Lake was not a crime ridden hotbed of Haitians, as Trump would have us.

But in fact, it's a welcoming community with a beautiful lake and a nice resort, because the Storm Lake Times championed it.

Were it not for the Times, I don't think those things would have happened, frankly, because we serve as a rallying point when it's necessary.

And a lot of people try to write us off as FDR liberals, because we do run an FDR editorial page.

But we're also a voice for Storm Lake in Des Moines and Washington, and that's very important.

And I think our readers appreciate it.

- You hit on some of this.

Maybe you can get into this in a little more depth.

But, when an area, a region, a city, a town, (throat clearing) excuse me, loses a local newspaper, what does democracy in general lose as well?

- Well, the foundation of a functioning democracy is an informed electorate.

If you don't know what your tax rates are, how can you vote on 'em?

If you don't know what that city council member stands for, how can you cast an intelligent vote, and have a functioning democracy?

And without a newspaper or a legitimate credible news source that provides a common set of facts, the fabric of the community deteriorates, as those studies indicate, and as we all know.

There is a direct relationship between the decline of newspaper readership that's been occurring my entire career, since say 1980, and it's been a steady decline, and there's also been a steady erosion of civic engagement.

And it kind of culminated, and I'm not exaggerating, it culminated in that January 6th attack on the US capital, which had stage rehearsals both in Minnesota and Michigan, both places where these news deserts are spreading, and where civic ignorance is rampant.

And because they're getting their information from some guy sitting in his underwear in Macedonia posting Facebook messages full of lies that are intended to destroy our democracy.

And you know what, journalists are the final wall that protects liberty.

And who do they go after first in Pakistan?

The journalists.

Who did Trump go after first?

The journalists, called us enemies of the people.

Well, I could go on a rant here, and I'm about to, so I'll stop.

- Wow, that is really powerful.

What advice would you give to young people who may be interested in a journalism career given the situation today in America?

What would you tell, and I'm sure you have had these conversations with young people.

- And I would just follow up on that too, and particularly to young people who might be interested in doing what you did, and starting a paper in a news desert.

- Yeah well, it's a very strange time right now in local news.

And there's a lot of really exciting things happening.

For example, in San Francisco, a woman started a new service for Latinos and Mayan, native Mayan people, who are living in Oakland.

Where she directly texts them the news, and then they interact, they text back to reporters to learn more.

Really hyper-local of person to person journalism.

And there's iterations of these things going on across the country because of the crisis in local journalism, because these news organizations are failing under assault from Facebook, Google, Craigslist, and assaulting our revenue base.

So there's, in creative destruction there lies opportunity.

And unfortunately I'm an old white guy with white hair, and I have these legacy costs that involve newsprint and newspaper presses.

But a kid can start up a digital thing, like we did in 1990, using Macintosh computers, and laying out all our pages on the screen, which was really innovation.

Well, now I'm old, and gray, and full of sleep, and I'm not as innovative.

But somebody 30 years younger than me has a great opportunity to do digital startups in these news deserts with relatively little capital, if they have a lot of sweat to invest.

And I say, go for it.

We're trying, now what I'm trying to do is put on my young man knickers, and reinvent the Storm Lake Times digitally, while maintaining our legacy publication.

And that's very costly.

And that's what's gonna take philanthropy.

We need help.

We've set up something called the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation so people can give tax deductible gifts to a non-profit that supports independent family-owned newspapers in rural Iowa, about five family-owned newspapers, including La Prensa of Iowa, which is a Latino publication.

And it's gonna take philanthropy for us to build this digital infrastructure in rural areas, to fill up these news deserts and make 'em bloom again.

- [G.] Well, good luck with that work.

That's so important.

- I was curious, what are the principle barriers?

When you talk about the challenges to creating a digital version of the Storm Lake Times, what more than a website are you talking about?

- Well, audio, video, texting, Instagram, Facebook, using all social media.

I can lay down an ink stripe on a Harris V15 Press, 'til who laid the rail, but I don't give a damn about TikTok.

And somebody has to, somebody has to give a damn about TikTok.

Even if it is owned by the Chinese.

- Is that a generational challenge?

I mean, is it about bringing younger, more innovative talent into the industry?

- Yes.

And the problem is that you gotta have us old guys around who have institutional knowledge, and who actually understand the economics of the business, while bringing son Tom along.

My son, who's our general assignment reporter, and his generation that does understand TikTok.

And somehow we have to hand off the ball.

And that's really tough because there's no capital.

So essentially we're gonna give the newspaper to the next generation in hopes that they, it'll give them enough oxygen to make that transition.

Right now, John and I are working for free on social security.

And so we need to raise funds.

There's been a tremendous loss of advertising revenue.

Newspapers used to, about 80% of their revenue was from display advertising.

80% of that was from classified advertising, that Craigslist obliterated.

So we've gotta replace that revenue somehow.

In the longterm, it's gonna come from readers paying for information, paying for the news.

Freedom is worth the price of a cup of coffee.

But in the meantime, in say a five-year interim, there's gonna be another 300 news deserts if philanthropy doesn't stop it, step in right now to save them.

- Art, this is a fascinating conversation.

You're doing great work.

We also wanna note that you're also the previous author of "Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper."

Thank you so much for being with us today.

- [Art] Well, thanks for the plug.

- That's all the time, you're welcome.

That's all the time we have this week, but if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on Facebook and Twitter, or visit pellcenter.org, where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Lewis asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

(dynamic music)